Prism Sounds Titan audio interfaces are playing a key role in helping US audio and moving image preservation company George Blood L.P. to complete a unique community project, which aims to create a digitized reference collection of 78rpm records.

Entitled The Great 78 Project, this extraordinary venture has already digitized 35,000 sides and ultimately aims to digitize in excess of 400,000 sides for preservation, discovery and research.

The Titans were chosen for The Great 78 Project because these interfaces are ideally suited to its streamlined workflow, which sees audio being recorded directly onto a computer. Company founder and preservation expert George Blood also cites their reliability and sonic excellence as reasons for choosing the units plus the high reliability of Prism Sound Hardware and the fact that he has been a Prism Sound user for more than 20 years and places great store in the relationship he has with the company.

We have had a long, very happy history of working with Prism Sound and the technical support is fabulous, he says. That relationship matters a lot. We are also receiving very positive feedback from our peers in the trade for the quality of our transfers - even at the highest production scale achieved by anyone worldwide. The reliability of the Titans helps us keep the price down while delivering on the sonic fidelity that preservation requires and meets the demands of our clients and engineers.

The Great 78 Project is currently digitizing nearly 400 sides a day at George Blood L.P.s Philadelphia studios, which operate 16 hours a day, six days a week. Every month an HDD containing 5-7000 sides is sent to the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/georgeblood), which uploads them onto its servers where they can be accessed by researchers in a format that allows them to be manipulated and studied without harming the original, very delicate shellac artifacts.

To record audio from the 78rpm discs, George Blood has devised a custom turntable with four tonearms. We capture both groove walls of four different stylus sizes, with and without EQ for each side, he explains, That's 16 channels in total, which are recorded using two Prism Sound Titans. In this way the user can decide the stylus size they like best. They can even mix and match - size A for the outside of the discs, size B for the inside of the discs, size C for a damaged part of the discs, and size D for some instrument or four bar phrase.

Apart from the Titan units, George Blood L.P. is also using six Prism Sound ADA-8XR multichannel converters, an AD-2 converter and a 2024 BitSplitter in its music studios where staff have worked on over 45 GRAMMY® nominated projects over the years.

We have finally had to replace power supply capacitors on our 15 year old ADA-8XRs due to old age but in general Prism Sound gear just works, year in and year out, Blood says. I'm happy to say our Titan units are holding up as well as our ADA-8XRs have. Whats more, everyone is happy with the sound.

The story behind The Great 78 Project goes back to 2013 when George Blood L.P was asked to digitize 10,000 sides for the US Library of Congress, taking in two collections - factory reference discs from the Thomas Edison National Historical Park and un-played or rarely played Victor discs from the Eldridge Johnson Victrola Museum pf the Delaware Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs.

78rpm discs are not standardized for speed, stylus size, or equalization, Blood explains. Normally digitizing 78s entails discovering not only the correct stylus size for that label at that time, but also considers how a different stylus size can compensate for years of wear. The wear may be from normal use, playback with the incorrect stylus, abuse, or other ravages of time.

Fortunately, the Library of Congress collections were in pristine condition and this allowed George Blood to select stylus size without consideration of wear. Further work on the Library of Congress OKeh label collection added to his knowledge because these discs were collected "in the wild", so condition was a consideration in the stylus size selection.

At about the same time we also digitized a large collection of random discs for New York University, and that served as the control for the study, Blood explains. All of this work led to the publication of a paper (by Indiana University) in which we analyzed our production data to determine the proper stylus size for these labels and the optimum playback speed.

It was purely by chance that, after giving an early version of his paper at the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, Blood found himself in a hallway with Brewster Kahle, founder and Digital Librarian at the Internet Archive, having a discussion on preserving 78s at scale. This discussion evolved into The Great 78 Project, which is funded by the Kahle/Austin Foundation - a family foundation that selectively funds arts projects, especially the Internet Archive.

From about 1898 to the 1950s, an estimated three million sides have been made on 78rpm discs, Blood explains. While the commercially viable recordings have been restored or remastered onto LPs or CD, there is still research value in the artifacts and usage evidence in the often rare 78rpm discs and recordings. So far, the Internet Archive has selected over 20 collections for physical and digital preservation. By preserving the often very prominent surface noise and imperfections, and including files generated by different sizes and shapes of stylus, it is possible to facilitate many kinds of analysis.

The Great 78 Project has plenty of work still to do and the organisers are keen to encourage members of the community to get involved. Donations are curated by B George, founder of the Archives of Contemporary Music in New York. Anyone can digitize 78s and add them to the Internet Archive and the public can also contribute metadata (whether discographic, or anecdotal), make blog postings about recordings, regroup/curate them into collections and add other materials such as biographical, bibliographic, advertisements, etc. The Project is especially eager for researchers to explore the collection and points out that, with 16 versions of every side, there is plenty of scope for a thesis. For example, can someone build a better noise reduction algorithm? Or what about exploring performance practice or social mores and norms from the era or studying dialects and the evolution of musical styles?

If nothing else, the public are encouraged to check out this amazing resource because there is so much of interest to be discovered among these thousands of newly digitized tracks.

For more information please follow this link: https://great78.archive.org/

AJA Video Systems todayreleased v1.1 firmware for its IPR-10G-HDMI Mini-Converter, which enables SMPTE ST 2110 IP video/audio to HDMI. Available as a free download, the update adds support for UltraHD up to 30p and integrates new improvements for discovery, registration and control.

Studio Technologies, manufacturer of high-quality audio, video, and fiber-optic solutions, introduces the Model 5330 Flex-Use Dante(r) Audio Interface, a simple yet high-performance means of interfacing analog signals with applications that utilize Dante audio-over-Ethernet media networking technology. Four line-level analog sources can be connected to the unit and then, after conversion to digital, output by way of four output (transmitter) channels associated with the Dante interface. Four signals that arrive by way of Dante can be converted to analog and then output as balanced line-level signals. A 2-channel/stereo monitor section allows the input and output signals to be selectively observed using meters, a headphone output, and line-level outputs.

JVC Professional Video, a division of JVCKENWOOD USA Corporation, today announced CN2, an independent cable TV station in Rock Hill, S.C., purchased a ProHD Portable Bridge bonded LTE hotspot in August to provide live news updates for its daily newscast and website. David Bain, technical manager, said the Bridge and a new BR-DE900 ProHD decoder allow CN2 to provide live content for its viewers for the first time.

Digital Alert Systems/Monroe Electronics, the global leader in emergency communications solutions for video services providers, today announced that it has partnered with DigIt Signage Technologies to interface the ChyTV™ HD-EAS, a version of the ChyTV video graphics system for television, information displays, and digital signage, with the DASDEC™ series of Emergency Alert System/Common Alerting Protocol (EAS/CAP) flexible emergency communications devices. The integration brings the marketplace a better, lower-cost solution for creating selective, high-quality crawls for EAS alerts on standard- and high-definition (SD and HD) channels.

The Alliance for IP Media Solutions (AIMS) today announced a newly elected 2018-2019 board of directors who will lead the organization's effort toward a standards-based IP infrastructure for professional media. All existing board members — AIMS Board Chair Michael Cronk (Grass Valley), Deputy Board Chair Steve Reynolds (Imagine Communications), Chief Financial Officer Andreas Hilmer (Lawo), and Board Member Andy Warman (Harmonic) — were re-elected to their positions and are joined by newly elected Board Member Larissa Görner (Net Insight).

As the newest addition to TNDV: Television’s fleet of nine full-service mobile video units, Destination packs full-sized production truck capabilities—including all the bells and whistles high-end clients expect—into a more agile, compact 40-foot vehicle that can maneuver in the most space-challenged venues.

WORK Microwave Partners With Technical University of Munich on DVB-S2X Field Test

Posted: 15/11/2018

WORK Microwave, a leading European manufacturer of advanced satellite communications equipment, today announced that it has partnered with the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Institute of Astronautics, to conduct a comprehensive field test on DVB-S2X and Adaptive Coding and Modulation (ACM) technologies. The main purpose of the field test was to prove that DVB-S2X modems with built-in ACM technology significantly increase data throughput and service availability in any weather environment. The field test was also embedded into the CopKa research project environment.

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert Selects Bannister Lake to Integrate Live Data-Driven Graphics

Posted: 14/11/2018

Bannister Lake, the leading provider of professional broadcast data aggregation and visualization solutions, today announced that the company's graphic integration services were used to generate key graphics for the special live election night broadcast of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Nov. 6. To help audiences visualize the unfolding results of the midterm elections, The Late Show's production team turned to Bannister Lake to prepare and integrate graphics into the live broadcast that showed the House of Representatives and the Senate populated with the number of elected officials.

Today at Inter BEE 2018, AJA Video Systems announced that KONA 5 is now shipping. The next generation of AJA’s industry-leading KONA line, KONA 5 is a video and audio I/O card supporting the latest 12G-SDI I/O and HDMI 2.0 monitoring video connections, designed for workstations or Thunderbolt™ 3-connected chassis. KONA 5 enables single-cable 4K/UltraHD high frame rate, deep color and HDR workflows with the most popular creative applications on macOS, Windows, and Linux. For Developers using the AJA SDK, KONA 5 also offers advanced features including multi-channel 4K I/O and 8K 60p support.

Boothbay Region Community Television Reignites Itself through Live Streaming with Cablecast Community Media Platform

Posted: 14/11/2018

First established in 1995 as an ad hoc committee of the Boothbay Harbor town government, Boothbay Region Community Television (BRCTV) inspires, educates and facilitates video and filmmaking not only in the Boothbay Region, but across the entire state of Maine. When the station set out to refresh and reinvent itself last year with an emphasis on live streaming, they chose the Cablecast Community Media platform and Cablecast Reflect cloud-based stream delivery service from Tightrope Media Systems as the linchpins of its operations.

EditShare® a technology leader in intelligent scale-out storage, AQC and media management solutions, is helping UbiSoft Montreal meet the demands of live capture, editing and real-time playback of up to 4K content with its enterprise EditShare XStream EFS 450 shared storage solutions and integrated EditShare Geevs video servers which support up to 4 concurrent ingest and playout streams. “We have a different set up from the typical capture or montage studio. First, our montage studio is larger than the average. With over 3,500 people on staff, we have a lot of different connections and workflow demands,” says Michel Forbes, System Administrator, Ubisoft Montreal. “One of the key workflows is live capture, edit and real-time video playback. This is the defacto workflow for many teams; the complexity of managing such a large operation and heavy project load requires a high degree of organization and system performance. We researched the options and found EditShare to be versatile enough to meet the requirements with the performance necessary to support the nuances and needs of these demanding productions.”

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